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Trump is right per Russia.
RUSSIA TAUNTS USA WITH BIGGEST MILITARY OFFENSIVE SINCE COLD WAR
TEN WARSHIPS DESCEND ON ENGLISH CHANNEL
Per? I never thought you would admit that Trump is a Putin surrogate.Originally Posted by TYLERTECHSAS
Hillary will do nothing and Putin will do whatever he wants!! Trump was correct...Putin has NO RESPECT for Clinton or Obozo!!!
Worst President and crazy liberal California "Governor Moonbeam".
Pentagon orders soldiers to repay enlistment bonuses -- decade after going to war!
Thousands of California soldiers forced to repay enlistment bonuses a decade after going to war
Copyright © 2016, Los Angeles Times
David S. Cloud
Short of troops to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan a decade ago, the California National Guard enticed thousands of soldiers with bonuses of $15,000 or more to reenlist and go to war.
Now the Pentagon is demanding the money back.
Nearly 10,000 soldiers, many of whom served multiple combat tours, have been ordered to repay large enlistment bonuses — and slapped with interest charges, wage garnishments and tax liens if they refuse — after audits revealed widespread overpayments by the California Guard at the height of the wars last decade.
Investigations have determined that lack of oversight allowed for widespread fraud and mismanagement by California Guard officials under pressure to meet enlistment targets.
“These bonuses were used to keep people in,” said Christopher Van Meter, a 42-year-old former Army captain and Iraq veteran from Manteca, Calif., who says he refinanced his home mortgage to repay $25,000 in reenlistment bonuses and $21,000 in student loan repayments that the Army says he should not have received. “People like me just got screwed.”
In Iraq, Van Meter was thrown from an armored vehicle turret — and later awarded a Purple Heart for his combat injuries — after the vehicle detonated a buried roadside bomb.
Susan Haley, a Los Angeles native and former Army master sergeant who deployed to Afghanistan in 2008, said she sends the Pentagon $650 a month — a quarter of her family’s income — to pay down $20,500 in bonuses that the Guard says were given to her improperly.
“I feel totally betrayed,” said Haley, 47, who served 26 years in the Army along with her husband and oldest son, a medic who lost a leg in combat in Afghanistan.
Haley, who now lives in Kempner, Texas, worries they may have to sell their house to repay the bonuses. “They’ll get their money, but I want those years back,” she said, referring to her six-year reenlistment.
U.S. veterans support legal fight by Yemeni man whose relatives were killed in drone strike »
The problem offers a dark perspective on the Pentagon’s use of hefty cash incentives to fill its all-volunteer force during the longest era of warfare in the nation’s history.
Even Guard officials concede that taking back the money from military veterans is distasteful.
“At the end of the day, the soldiers ended up paying the largest price,” said Maj. Gen. Matthew Beevers, deputy commander of the California Guard. “We’d be more than happy to absolve these people of their debts. We just can’t do it. We’d be breaking the law.”
Facing enlistment shortfalls and two major wars with no end in sight, the Pentagon began offering the most generous incentives in its history to retain soldiers in the mid-2000s.
It also began paying the money up front, like the signing bonuses that some businesses pay in the civilian sector.
More
If they were over-payments, then it is completely reasonable to have them pay it back.
If they presented it to them as re-enlistment bonuses then it is not reasonable to require them to pay it back. It sounds like that's what they did.
Still looks like a matter of over-payment. Promised $20,000, given $30,000. They're as responsible for that extra $10,000 and required to of caught it and returned it.
If these California "over payments" were a decade ago, there is no way anyone is obligated to "repay".
I'm surprised that TYLERTECHSAS is in favor of any kind of over payments.
Where does it say in this article that that's what happened? From what I'm reading, they offered X dollars for them to reenlist. They accepted the money and reenlisted. If it was an overpayment in their base pay or other allowances then I agree. They should pay it back. In my 20 years of service, this happened a few times and they always withheld it sometime later...no big deal. In my opinion, this was a bonus for them signing a contract extension that they were told they were qualified for by their leadership...people they should be able to trust in these matters. The government needs to eat this one and get off these people's back.
Lawmakers blast Pentagon over 'boneheaded' clawback of improper military bonuses
Published October 24, 2016
FoxNews.com
The article doesn't. My CA ARNG contacts do. It is probable both parts are going on.
OMG!!
Bush officials wanted Obama to help close troop deal with Iraq
Outgoing George W. Bush White House officials privately urged Barack Obama in November 2008 to support talks with Baghdad that would allow U.S. troops to remain Iraq for several years, but the incoming president's team demurred, new emails published by WikiLeaks show.
The agreement, known as the Status of Forces Agreement, or SOFA, has become a fiercely contested topic in recent years, with Bush’s team insisting that Obama could have further extended it once in office, and the president’s supporters insisting that was not possible.
But at the time of the post-election exchange, which featured Bush’s top national security council aide for Iraq, Douglas Lute, and senior Obama adviser, and now chief of staff, Denis McDonough, the Bush administration was still negotiating terms with Iraq’s government to keep tens of thousands of American soldiers in the country for three more years.
According to Lute’s Nov. 11 email, the talks were clouded by the Iraqi government’s uncertainty over where Obama, who had campaigned on a gradual U.S troop withdrawal from Iraq, stood on the question.
Saying that the U.S. had sent the Iraqis “a text we consider final,” Lute — who said he was following up on a prior conversation between McDonough and Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen Hadley — wrote that the Iraqis were “keenly interested in understanding President-Elect Obama's position on the SOFA.”
“Indeed, a number of senior Iraqi officials - including a number of Prime Minister's most senior advisors -- are claiming that Mr. Obama will not support a SOFA signed by President Bush and interpreting the few messages publicly available as a pretext to reject the agreement on the table,” Lute wrote. “After the transition team has had time to review the SOFA text, we ask that the Obama team express support for the SOFA, lest the Iraqis use previous positions or the absence of comment to scuttle the deal.”
The pact was needed because U.S. troops were acting under a United Nations mandate due to expire on Dec. 31, a few weeks before Obama would take office.
Lute even offered a proposed language for an Obama statement, which included the vow that the president election would “respect the agreement as negotiated and not insist it be ratified by the US Congress.”
McDonough passed along Lute’s email to several other top Obama foreign policy advisers, including Susan Rice, Mark Lippert, and James Steinberg. John Podesta, then an Obama transition adviser, was later added to the email chain; the exchange was contained in his email account, which U.S. officials have said was hacked at the direction of the Russian government.
“I think we should be cautious about getting in the middle of this,” warned Steinberg, a former Bill Clinton administration official who would become Obama’s deputy secretary of state. “We have one President at a time and we don't propose to get into the middle of the negotations [sic]. If we get briefed now and we don't like it, what do we propose to do -- tell Hadley we can't support it? I think they should do the deed and hopefully its something we can support. The alternative puts us in a position [where] they're using our clout without [us] having any influence on the conduct of the negotation [sic].”
“Good point,” McDonough replied, adding that another transition official was scheduled to attend another unspecified briefing the next day. “We can see where we are then.”
Obama did not weigh in publicly on the details of the talks until the deal was formally concluded several days later, on Nov. 17. It allowed for U.S. troops to remain in Iraq, with legal immunity there, until December 31, 2011.
"President-elect Obama believes it is critical that a status-of-forces agreement that ensures sufficient protections for our men and women in uniform is reached before the end of the year. We look forward to reviewing the final text of the agreement," an Obama spokesperson said at the time.
As president, Obama honored the agreement, which he did not submit to the U.S. Congress for approval. He also did not extend the SOFA, for reasons that are still the subject of dispute, and removed all U.S. combat troops from Iraq by the end of 2011.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/live-blog-up...#ixzz4O2xyptyB
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